Month: January 2020

Rhubarb Sketchbook

sketchbook

I’ve got most of my Brief History of Rhubarb animation in the can and all the artwork completed but I’m still working on the scene where a man picks up glass of rhubarb aperitif. It’s a surprisingly tricky bit of animation to get right but I’m determined not to fudge it and ‘cheat’, so hopefully I’ll get it to work smoothly over the weekend.

In the meantime I’m planning my next animation for the Rhubarb Festival Richard Bell’s Rhubarb Triangle Sketchbook.

My storyboard (above) gives the gist of it, a sketchbook brought to life, with the drawn characters, such as a Middleton collier, telling the story themselves. I’ll then pan around the page for close-ups of relevant pen and watercolour drawings.

storyboard

I’m using picture maps and pen and watercolour drawings that I drew for my booklet Walks in the Rhubarb Triangle, so I’ve got plenty of material to choose from to tell my story and conjure up an impression of Rhubarb Triangle country.

Bunny-hopping Pigeon

sunrise
Sunrise, 20th January
pigeon jumping

The male wood pigeon’s display as he follows the female around the lawn, includes short bunny hops, jumping an inch in the air and an inch forward. He then makes a series of deep, polite bows.

How can she resist him? She glances at him with embarrassed coyness and goes on pecking at the spilt sunflower hearts beneath the feeders.

pigeon bows

Arboretum

arboretum

On our regular walks around Newmillerdam Lake, I’ll often take the upper path via the arboretum, while Barbara and her brother stick to the lakeside. We were a bit later starting today, so, change of plan, I headed straight for the Lakeside Cafe, where I sketched the stone-built house over my latte and flapjack, before heading clockwise past the war memorial and meeting up with Barbara and her brother at the boathouse, near the end of their anticlockwise circuit of the lake.

Most in evidence today, tufted ducks dotted ten or twenty yards from the shore, hunkering down from the cool breeze blowing up the valley, in an area where we often see them diving for freshwater mussels.

Published
Categorized as Drawing

The Elusive Glass of Zucca

Rabarbaro Zucca

A man walks into a bar, not just any bar, this is the famed Zucca’s Bar in Milan, and orders the speciality, Rabarbaro Zucca, a rhubarb-based aperitif. But he’s out of luck, I’m only halfway through the tutorial on how a character picks up an object in the Adobe Character Animator tutorial, so he’s going to have to wait until tomorrow to finally get that drink.

The Rhubarb Express

My latest animation: the Rhubarb Express from Ardsley Station in the heart of Rhubarb Triangle, taking forced rhubarb to London.

Culpeper Speaks

Take one of Culpeper’s talk about the medicinal qualities of rhubarb. Perhaps I’ll come back and re-record the voiceover and add one or two sound effects but after a weekend sorting out various technical challenges, at least I’ve got him moving and talking.

Rhuben

Rhuben

Let me introduce head gardener Rhuben Cushstead, a man so well-versed in all things rhubarb that you’d go to considerable efforts to avoid striking up a conversation on the subject with him, if you spotted him in the pub.

gardener

I’ve designed Rhuben to be a narrator in the opening Brief History of Rhubarb section of my animation for next month’s Rhubarb Festival. In the original comic strip, a Victorian gardener makes a brief appearance, followed by a couple of frames about the cultivation of forced rhubarb, so it made sense in my animation to have the gardener himself addressing the audience directly.

I can think of several gardeners I know who would be brilliant doing the voiceover for Rhuben, but to keep things simple, it’s going to have to be my voice. But that’s quite appropriate as whenever I record a voiceover it always sounds exactly like the kind of character ‘that you’d go to considerable efforts to avoid striking up a conversation with, if you spotted him in the pub.’

Culpeper on Rhubarb

When rhubarb arrived in Europe, it was prized as a medicine:

“It is under the dominion of Mars . . . It is good against venomous bites.”

Nicholas Culpeper, 1653

In my Rhubarb Festival animation, A Brief History of Rhubarb, herbalist Nicholas Culpeper will be giving the 17th century equivalent of a TED Talk. In the final version he’ll have his own version of a Power Point slide to point at: a scroll nailed to the wall. I’ll record a line of dialogue, so his mouth and eyes will be animated and, yes, that impressive moustache will twitch expressively too.

Marco Polo’s Rhubarb

Today’s snippet of animation: Marco Polo visit the mountains of Tangut, China, where he finds rhubarb in great abundance.

In the final version there will be some lip-synced dialogue, eye movement and some twitching of the moustache. And I won’t be able resist having the top of his hat moving a little.

Published
Categorized as cartoon